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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", explores the loneliness of power in "Autumn of the Patriarch". "Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside." As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man lying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their arrogant, manically violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea, can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal? Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lives have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Marquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality. "Delights with its quirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its total originality." ("Vogue"). "Captures perfectly the moral squalor and political paralysis that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long-term dictator." ("Guardian"). "Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do." (Salman Rushdie). As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include "Bon Voyage Mr.President", "Chronicle of a Death Foretold", "Collected Stories", "The General in his Labyrinth", "In the Evil Hour", "Innocent Erendira and Other Stories", "Leaf Storm", "Living to Tell the Tale", "Love in the Time of Cholera", "Memories of Melancholy Whores", "News of a Kidnapping", "No-one Writes to the Colonel", "Of Love and Other Demons", "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" and "Strange Pilgrims".

"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" is a compelling, moving story exploring injustice and mob hysteria by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera". "On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on." Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen - including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man arrives in town to try and piece together the truth from the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk. To at last understand what happened to Santiago, and why..."A masterpiece." ("Evening Standard"). "A work of high explosiveness - the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel." ("The Times"). "Brilliant writer, brilliant book." ("Guardian"). As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include "Autumn of the Patriarch", "Bon Voyage Mr. President", "Collected Stories", "The General in his Labyrinth", "In the Evil Hour", "Innocent Erendira and Other Stories", "Leaf Storm", "Living to Tell the Tale", "Love in the Time of Cholera", "Memories of Melancholy Whores", "News of a Kidnapping", "No-one Writes to the Colonel", "Of Love and Other Demons", "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" and "Strange Pilgrims".

Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes: Eyes of a Blue Dog,Big Mama's Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of lnnocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.

Renowned as a master of magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has long delighted readers around the world with his exquisitely crafted prose. Brimming with unforgettable characters and set in exotic locales, his fiction transports readers to a world that is at once fanciful, haunting, and real.

Leaf Storm, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first novella, introduces the mythical village of Macondo, a desolate town beset by torrents of rain, where a man must fulfill a promise made years earlier.

No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella of life in a decaying tropical town in Colombia with an unforgettable central character.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a dark and profound story of three people joined together in a fatal act of violence.

Granta is a leading literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom. Initially founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as The Granta, it was successfully relaunched as a magazine of "new writing" in 1979. Granta is a literary quarterly with a distinctive mix of fiction, personal history, reportage, and documentary photography.

A novella and eleven short stories, representing early work from the 1950s, as well as fiction written in the 1960s and 1970s, by the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author, provides proof of his imaginative and technical exuberance and mastery and includesTitle: Innocent Erendira and Other StoriesAuthor: Garcia Marquez, Gabriel/ Rabassa, Gregory (TRN)Publisher: HarpercollinsPublication Date: 2005/02/01Number of Pages: 183Binding Type: PAPERBACKLibrary of Congress: 2004051257

Paperback. Pub Date :2005-02-01 Pages: 192 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins US Written with compassionate realism and wit. the stories in this mesmerizing collection depict the disparities of town and village life in South America. of the frightfully poor and outrageously rich. of memories and illusions. and of lost opportunities and present joys.

More editions of No One Writes to the Colonel: and Other Stories (Perennial Classics):

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. "Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.

The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."

With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature. --Alix Wilber